The Greatest


Am I the life of anything other than
Shit talking and manic episodes?
Greatest hater to ever walk these streets:
Bourbon on ice, rye neat, gin with vermouth,
Or whatever that one guy made me that one time.
Not even looking to get fucked up,
More just validation,
An excuse to be myself
To soften the edge from here to there
I see no point in the middle
I see no point in the essence
Looks like the juice is all squeezed out
And we’re left sucking on rinds

 RPM
—For EGA

 
The couple next to me in CVS talk Bitcoin.
This is so far from my reality, it would
be redundant to laugh. I wear grey sweatpants

from a bygone era, my glasses are crooked,
and I haven’t bothered to trim my nose hairs.
I’m thinking of getting the latest Stones album

on vinyl. Though my fragile LPs are analog.
Streaming music is digital. My Pioneer
PL-50 turntable is my age, so I may need

to replace the stylus. (I’m talking about a needle,
not a tablet accessory.) Regarding the indie
music scene, Kurt Cobain said, “Let them eat vinyl.”

I don’t mind if you think LPs are for hipsters
and old folks. More for me. My attention span
is large enough to listen to an entire

album side at a time. I don’t want to go
to a concert and see some guy turn on a laptop.
Put your sterilized, overproduced modern

music in a bong and smoke it. Life has
the occasional pop and hiss. Gimmie danger
and distortion! Which aisle is the Metamucil on?

observe and remember

 
i am the lonely man
you see in the coffee
aisle

looking for something
that is just dark, simple,
easy

the little joys i can find
sometimes

the rest of life is spent
eyes open mouth shut

observe and remember

all life is is content

i would love for that
to change at some
point before i die

but my desperation
hasn't reached the
stages of mail order
brides or falling in
love with a stripper

of course

i still have a few
years to go

"The Quiet One"

Silver water and stars
All my heroes gone

And I'm growing old
Can't do what I use to do

Doesn't seem fair
To end like this

So I'll make it quick
With one last stand

Left jab
Overhand right

Left hook to the ribs
Right crusher to the chin

Coleman would have been proud
To see his grandson go out
Standing up

Since I never saw him
When he was alive

My Dad and I
Only knowing the stories

My Dad welterweight champion
Of the Airforce

And I hidden in the shadows
Of the spirit world
Doer of the done

The quiet one
Floating
In the silver water and stars.

If This is Love I’m Not Happy


Mexican Carol and I would drink Coors, hit a few bongs, and watch Alfred Hitchcock; after a good hard romp. I called her Mexican because I was also poking Red-Haired Carol and Pizza Hut Carol. She was Mexican too, right down to her little chile bean nipples.

It was convenient having three women named Carol at the same time, besides the obvious fact of never calling out the wrong name in the throes of orgasm, each was special in her own way.

Red-Haired Carol had an hour glass figure. She could have stepped out of a center fold, no staple. I believe she could’ve sucked the chrome off a 57 Chevy Nomad. Carrot top red, on both ends; makes my gonads tingle just thinking about all that red hair splayed across my lap.

Pizza Hut Carol was manager of, you guessed it, Pizza Hut. She was a big boned lady, not fat, just husky. I ate so much pizza and chugged so many free beers, they should’ve put my picture on their logo. This Carol was into leather, but not the tie me up and do kinky things kind; she had tools and hammers and made belts with your name on them. She liked it in unusual places: the floor, tables, and counter of Pizza
Hut, up against the lion’s cage at the zoo, the cemetery, on top her Ford Falcon at the drive-in movie.

We once did it on the toilet at her grandparent’s house, going so wild we ripped the commode out of the floor. I’ll never forget what her grand-dad told me, standing there pointing his scatter gun at my belly button.

“Son, you ever come in my house again, I’ll blow your guts into such little pieces the buzzards won’t even waste time on ’em.”

My mother told me I’d always been attracted to Latin women. She said it started on a Greyhound bus on the way to Hollywood. We were going to the Queen For A Day Show from Fresno. She wanted to expose her rough, downtrodden life of being married to a bricklayer, to all America. How they were all no-good drunken skunk sons of bitches. There was this beautiful Mexican Lady on the bus, that held me while Mother went to the bathroom. When she got back to her dismay, I had my tiny two-year-old fingers up
the woman’s dress. The lady and I were both smiling and enjoying ourselves.

Mexican Carol was my favorite. She could bump and grind and squeeze and tease. I told her she could milk a barn full of cows, better than a machine. She was so sweet, even her farts smelled like Chanel numero cinco.

My amigo always asked me how I managed three women.

I replied, “One at a time.”

“There must be some advice you could give me?”

“Never lie, never tell everything, and get a secret weapon.”

“Secret weapon?” he asked.

“You heard me.”

“Well. Do I gotta beg?”

“How long have I known you?” I asked him.

“All your life, I’m your cousin,” he replied.

“I guess that’s long enough. What I am about to reveal to you has never been seen by a man.” I gave him my poem. He read it.

I Am

I am a rainbow, Jack the Ripper’s knife, a tumble weed, the petals of a rose, a worm drowning in mescal, Van Gogh’s ear, the Statue of Liberty, Hendrix’s guitar. I am now. I am free. I am.

“A poem?”

“That’s it.”

My sexathon continued. I felt like the Sheik of Arabia.

One afternoon I walked into Mexican Carol’s, the other two Carols were there also. This had never happened before, I smelled peligro, danger, dread.

One of them said, “The arrangement is no longer satisfactory.”

I awoke in the hospital, feeling like a herd of buffalo had walked on me.

A doctor entered the room, a dour look on his face.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

“Domestic problem,” I shrugged.

“Paramedics brought you in beaten, half to death.”

“Guess, I made it, huh?”

“That’s not all.”

“What are you keeping from me, doc?”

“You’ve been castrated. We found your left testicle lodged in your throat and were able to reattach it. We were unable to locate your right testicle.”

“Damn. Will I be okay, you know sexually?”

“In about six months you should be able to perform within limitations, maybe once a month.” The doctor left.

About an hour later the phone rang.

“Hello,” I answered.

“Que pasa, lefty?” I heard three women laughing their asses off.

Homo Homini Lupus


First I try reading myself back to sleep. Then I try sleeping on the couch. Then I get on the Internet. Endless wars. Out of control climate change. The hands of the Doomsday Clock creeping up on midnight. Oswald was just a dupe. Annihilation has always been the plan. Meanwhile, satellites outshine the stars.
&
It’s after six in the morning, but still dark out. I have an idea what might be hiding there. Homo homini lupus (“Man is wolf to man”). Most everything that suffers his attention dies from it. Hitler planned to open a Museum of an Extinct Race to celebrate the Final Solution, the liquidation of European Jewry. In the pages of this month’s Hadassah Magazine, Auschwitz survivors share treasured recipes.
&
Sunrise has turned the sky the color of tarnished blood. The trees sway like drunks. Somewhere a team of torturers shoves a hot wire up a prisoner’s penis. Birds feel the voice of God despite and sing.

 

It's a Sad Thing

Ya know, it's a sad thing
Going to the funeral
Of a friend.  Just sad.
Ya know you're gonna
Miss seeing them around.
Now then, see, going to
The funeral of an asshole
Is a laughin', knee slappin',
Ear to ear grinnin' time.
The old hateful varmint
Is justa lyin' there in the box.
Stake for the heart, crucifix,
And garlic on hand just in case.
You wonder what they're
Up to now they're in Satan's
Happy go lucky playground.
Stoke that furnace.  No way
Are there any breaks there.
That ice cream and cold beer
Are just for looks.  Want some?
Hell no!  Get your ass back to
Work!  Fun, ain't it? 

Cheese Icarus

 
Peripheral
paraphernalia burned
away, Icarus is
the cheese
that stands
alone,
porous like
Swiss,
greening like
gorgonzola—
sun-grilled,
sandwiched
between
sky & sea,
melting into tailless
tuna in the oily
Aegean.

M.C. Escher
convergence of
fish & bird,
Icarus is
also a mosaic
piece, a
nursery rhyme
fragment, cast-
away fingernail
paring; a floating
obscene
signifier—
but always,
the solitary
cheese; single
waxy Kraft
slice, residue
of manufactured
American
hunger, standing
alone. 

Statement adapted from the letters of A. Scott Buch:

How is one to meaningfully define an underground? For it not to be simply an alternative establishment, it needs to have aims, philosophies, and systems, which are in structural opposition to the status quo. One feature of our status quo from my critical perspective, is that it postures as if fame and fortune were legitimate possibilities; when in reality to achieve a mere baseline economic status is tantamount to a pipe dream. In truth, these are likely two sides of the same coin. This is what the underground should stand to correct. It should attempt to reverse the fictitious ideology into a material reality where baseline economic status was possible. However this comes with a project of needing to call out the ideology of fame and fortune as the establishment’s carrot on a stick—one that later asserts a force on the artist which effectively makes one 'sell out.' Really, the model of fame and fortune is what robs everybody who could be a great poet, or artist, from being able to make a living. So the practical goal of an underground should be to challenge the norm that, but an elite lucky few can make a living from poetry. It should be to set out to squash and demystify, the carrot on a stick of wealth and fame which obfuscates the fact that it won’t even give us mere food and rent. The twofold position to emphasize here at the end is: That writing is work worth being compensated. AND can we not glimpse a different picture of work beyond the vulgar ideological notion it’s only as valuable as its mirror image in a token of money? For a radical poet, no? the underground should mean a mutual aid of artists in the form of a community. And where that human relating is more valuable than—although, for a time, not entirely a viable alternative—to being paid?



“Light Through The Cracks”

In my solitude,
I pen the names Julian and Stella,
And think of the sadness from son to father,
The warm noble face of John Shipton,
And imagining that an Empire of lies will fall
As a family is reunited.
I have been alone in my worries
As long as you were captured and imprisoned for publishing truth,
As long as the apathy of a nation has been amnesiac
Of the crimes of their government,
For as long as waking up to truth, in the imperial core,
Is as the construction of a solitary jail cell.
Rather than the deterioration of your person,
May these structures collapse in all their evil glory,
Around the sky and the star.



“I Cannot Eat From My Writing, Nor Is Assange Free, Though One May Not See A Connection”

No, the platform should not be owned.
No I shall not let the grave power of a name,
Become the object of burden like the depressed weight of neglect.
I won’t abide by these dotted-line borders like pissing-corners,
I won’t assume all social interaction can be narrowed
Like backalleys of the destitute
Into following, and quantities of who has followed.
The cowards in towers built on pretensions to authority
Leaves the drive to freedom homeless.
Then if we are left without an image,
If we are left without a picturesque of nature,
Without a joy in the vacuity of text;
Judge us for our lack of aesthetics,
Ignore us as the arbitrariness of power is free to do;
Give us not visibility in our humanness for our bread.
Take on your marquees, where you select, and produce value,
Like a god out of a severed penis.
No how ‘bout I go out demystified,
Say in a hail of bullets of being looked over for all time;
That a real person one day might be my validation
Like that of a true friend.
Let the walls of value not be drawn in the immoral scarcity
Applied to human living in economics,
Where all is an ossifying competition
In a world ruled by compulsion.
Where though one has never been to Belmarsh
They are subject to suffering
From the walls of unmovable power;
Granting the arrogance of oppression never to budge,
Despite the truth of its injustice being as naked as the huddled and abused
Who trembles from the years confined and solitary.
It becomes a constant scenery flipping indifferently past;
Like walking for miles on miles
Surrounded to the horizon
By countless crucified individuals.
In a slave rebellion we are never able to full win

Scarecrow

   ----Summer, 1969, China

An eleven-year-old boy
Visiting his mother at a labor camp
Under the scorching hot sun

He saw a scarecrow
Squatting on the side of
A rice paddy field

As he approached it
He was scared to find out
That’s his mother